What Barack Obama's young voters really want

By Eric Greenberg and Karl Weber

Nov 11, 2008 | 9:23 PM

The media thrive on stories of conflict. Looking back at the 2008 presidential race, it's easy to see how many of the narratives that dominated the news coverage and the punditry revolved around intergroup hostilities: white, rural voters versus multiethnic, urban voters; feminist supporters of Hillary Clinton versus male supporters of Barack Obama; blacks versus Hispanics; religious voters versus secular voters; Main Street versus Wall Street. Each of these supposedly intractable conflicts was declared, in turn, the key to the outcome in 2008.

In the end, none materialized to the extent imagined.

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But as we look ahead to the next four years, there's a new dividing line that some politicians will be eager to draw in the search for electoral advantage - a line based on a supposed generational rift. The reason? President-elect Obama won a two-thirds majority of 18- to 29-year-old voters, which ultimately helped propel him to victory. The youth vote also went 63% to 34% for House Democrats.

This is not a promising trend for Republicans. To try to blunt this movement going forward, some conservative defenders of the status quo will be trying to create a breach between those younger than 30 (the so-called Millennial Generation) and those above that age, using a supposed crisis in Social Security funding as the wedge issue.

In this new narrative, greedy Baby Boomers are said to be poised to bankrupt the Social Security system, leaving nothing for the younger workers who currently support the program through payroll taxes. It's a theme John McCain sounded, at least briefly, during the 2008 campaign. In a Denver town hall meeting in July of this year, he declared, "Americans have got to understand that we are paying present-day retirees with the taxes paid by young workers in America today. And that's a disgrace. It's an absolute disgrace, and it's got to be fixed." (Of course, this "disgraceful" feature of Social Security is exactly the reason the system has always worked and continues to work today.) The only "fair" solution, according to this account, is to privatize the system, in whole or in part, so that the Millennials will be able to save for their own retirements and get out from under the crushing burden of supporting their idle parents.

There's plenty wrong with this narrative, not to mention the fact that most people agree the Social Security system will be solvent for decades to come, and that only minor tweaking of tax rates and retirement ages is needed to maintain it for the foreseeable future. What's more, the "solution" of privatization would actually create the crisis it's supposed to avert, by diverting trillions of dollars out of Social Security.

Thankfully, there are good reasons to believe that the youthful Millennials will not fall for coming attempts to whip up intergenerational antagonism. In our book "Generation We," based on exhaustive research on the Millennial generation conducted by the respected firm of Gerstein | Agne, including a 2,000-person written survey and 12 focus groups - the most in-depth study ever made of the attitudes and values of the Millennials - we show that the political and social changes now being spearheaded will not be about intergenerational conflict.

The fact is that the real-world members of this new generation have little interest in fomenting resentment, scapegoating or intergenerational battles. Every survey and attitudinal study - including our own - confirms that today's young people respect and are eager to learn from people of their parents' and grandparents' generations. For example, in their massive study "Millennials Rising," generational scholars Neil Howe and William Strauss report, "Most teens say they identify with their parents' values, and more than nine in 10 say they 'trust' and 'feel close to' their parents. The proportion who report conflict with their parents is declining."

And while Millennials tend to trust older Americans, they're suspicious of those who seek to divide. They tend to see far-right dogmatists who espouse "traditional values" rhetoric as part of our nation's problems, not part of the solution. According to our study, when it comes to lifestyle choices - whether we're talking about sexual orientation, abortion, divorce or gay marriage or about gambling, drinking, drug use and church attendance - the all-but-explicit motto of the Millennials is "Live and let live."

In voting for change on Nov. 4, the Millennials sent a very clear message - that they are fed up with leaders who seek to divide Americans against one another, whether along moral, ethnic, religious, geographic or generational lines. That's an attitude our new national leadership should seek to encourage and build upon in the years to come.

Greenberg and Weber are the authors of "Generation We: How Millennial Youth Are Taking Over America And Changing Our World Forever."